Back To Basics, Big Boys, Beefsteaks

August 28, 1987|By Ellen Goodman, Washington Post Writers Group

BOSTON — Let me admit, right off the bat, that my offspring are not perfect. How many people will say that in public? Though I have raised them from infancy, nurtured them, spared neither expense nor affection in their upbringing, they have their flaws and I know it.

Take the two before me, both thoroughly mature. I must confess that their shape and complexion are just a bit off. They bear some scars, a bit of discoloration. They are a touch misshapen and carry internal marks of a genetic background that is, well, anomalous.

But when you are in the tomato-raising business, looks aren't everything. Taste is everything. These are my Big Boys. They are real tomatoes. The luscious natives of my 16th-acre, watched over, waited for, picked in their prime, about to be devoured.

Years ago, when I first planted a victory garden (a victory over rocks, bits of glass, and carbon monoxide), I brought forth from the reluctant urban soil a much wider variety of species. I cared for an entire nursery of eggplants, green peppers, lettuce, snap peas, green beans. I had my successes and failures in this venture, and must hold myself responsible for the unforgivably neglected toddler who grew into the Zucchini That Ate New York. It had to be stuffed.

But two years ago it occurred to me that all I really wanted anymore were tomatoes. And more tomatoes. This being the era of reproductive targeting, I decided to get what I wanted. I went back to basics and Big Boys, not to mention Beefsteaks.

Now I spend my late-summer weeks harvesting and devouring the only fruit that you salt, the once-designated ''love apple,'' the crop that Thomas Jefferson introduced to America: the glorious tomato. The kind that actually smells like a tomato. For about six weeks I become the abominable tomato glutton. I have been known to put a tomato on virtually everything, with the possible exception of ice cream.

Yet when this orgy ends, I again shall retreat, and just as abruptly, to my winter policy of tomato abstinence. A committed cultivator of the real thing, I have come to regard unseasonable and migrant tomatoes -- ''their'' tomatoes -- the way our forefathers once regarded the entire species: as inedible; possibly poisonous, at least to the soul.

Witnesses who watch my annual rite of passage from orgy to abstinence report that from October to August, I inspect any tomato that finds its way onto my restaurant plate as if it were a hamster dropping. My husband believes that I reserve my most severe moral judgment for these salad invaders. They receive a one-word death sentence: ''plastic.''

I am grateful for the failure of agribusiness to market a palatable winter variety of the species. The tomato is not a fruit for all seasons, but that rarity of modern life: something rooted in its natural space, a back yard on a warm August afternoon. So today, looking at my slightly flawed crop, I renew my pledge: I shall eat no tomato before (or after) its time. How nice that its time is now. Come here Big Boys.